I'm trying to get Debian onto a machine that has no OS at present. I
have a set of woody CDs.
The machine has an Adaptec RAID card (2400A) which needs the dpti
driver. This driver is present in kernel 2.4.20, but not in the 2.2.20
kernel used on the CD. The manufacturer only supplies drivers for
RedHat with kernel 2.4.16 (and one or two other earlier kernels).

Assuming this is the aacraid driver you're talking about, it's in the kernel
used by the 'bf2.4' flavour. Try that.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, but aacraid is not the right
driver; that kernel doesn't seem to have the dpti driver built in.

Do you have source for the driver? If so it is possible. If not,
I think you're out of luck.
I had to do something like this a couple of months ago. We got some
machines with e1000 network cards and we needed to install Debian on
them. bf2.4 doesn't have the e1000 driver but Intel supplies source
for 2.4.x kernels (it's in the latest 2.4 now, I think).
Because bf2.4 was built without module versioning _and_ it was
built with a screwy version string _and_ there is no source
(that I know of) for it readily available to the casual Debian
user (please correct me if I'm wrong), I had to take drastic measures.
I downloaded the kernel closest to bf2.4 (2.4.16 or something like that)
and hacked the Makefile so that it would have the same version string as
2.4.6-bf2.4-<whatever>. I then compiled the e1000 driver pointing to
this bastardized version of kernel 2.4.16. I then was able to use the
"load modules from disk" option in the boot-floppies installer. Worked
like a charm (after many failed attempts). I was lucky this worked
at all and it may not for all drivers. But give it a try if you have
driver source.
If bf2.4 kernel source truly is not available, why not? It's critical
for situations just like these. If it is available, the install guide
should probably include instructions about where to find it and how
to build external modules "under" it so that the "insert foreign
modules" procedure is more generally useful.
-Dave
--
"Some little people have music in them, but Fats, he was all music,
and you know how big he was." -- James P. Johnson